All I Want for Christmas

Written on Monday 15 December 2014

As December gets into full swing, one of the joyous seasonal activities that must be undertaken is the ritual filling of my Amazon wishlist with a bunch of crap I don’t need. This is all to help those stubborn relatives who can’t bring themselves to believe I’m telling the truth when I say “I don’t want anything”.

What I really want for Christmas is a tree covered in lights, a table to sit my friends and family around, a dinner to cook for as many as possible, a bottle of wine to drink and stories to tell.

But these days, it rarely seems like that’s an option. Every year we are deluged by adverts exhorting us to buy more and more needless stuff in the vague hope that it will make our families happy and our lives complete.

Spoilers: it doesn’t.

Consumerism has given us little but a yearly orgy of spending, credit card bills and vague disappointment; it’s given us nothing but the idea that happiness is inextricably linked to wealth. It’s benefitted not the middle classes and certainly not the poor — it’s benefitted bankers, politicians, advertising executives; the very people we love to hate but keep shovelling money at year after year.